Trump Doesn't Oppose Endless Wars

If it were anyone other than Trump taking these positions, his own supporters would be denouncing him as a neocon.

Donald Trump tells lots of lies, but one of the biggest and most frequently repeated lies is that he is opposed to U.S. foreign wars. He recently said, “We’re uniting forces to end the endless foreign wars.” It’s not a bad line, and it is designed to appeal to Americans sick of foreign conflicts, but Trump never ended a single war when he was president and he is currently campaigning on starting a new one in Mexico. When a candidate runs on a record as hawkish as Trump’s and when he promises more of the same, no one should believe him when he says he wants to end any wars.

The record speaks for itself. Trump had many opportunities to end wars when he was president, but he didn’t do it. Instead of ending them, Trump escalated every war he inherited. He sent more troops to Afghanistan. He loosened rules of engagement for U.S. strikes. He ramped up the drone war. He increased support for the Saudi coalition while it was slaughtering Yemeni civilians. He also refused to end U.S. involvement in the war on Yemen when Congress demanded it. His economic wars did considerable damage to several countries and hurt the people there without achieving anything.

Trump rails against endless wars in the abstract, but when it comes to specific policies he doesn’t follow through. One of his main attacks lately has been to bash Biden for withdrawing from Afghanistan. He won’t even support the ending of an endless war after the fact. Instead he regurgitates the dumbest hawkish talking points imaginable to pander to the dead-enders in the Republican Party that would have kept American troops in Afghanistan until the end of time. Trump’s position on the war in Gaza is that Israel should “finish the job,” which is a green light for massacres and ethnic cleansing. Trump routinely attacks Biden for being too hard on the Israeli government as it commits genocide. If it were anyone other than Trump taking these positions, his own supporters would be denouncing him as a neocon.

Many voters like it when Trump talks about expelling warmongers from government, but that is another lie. He isn’t going to do any such thing. On the contrary, we can expect that he will bring many more warmongers into his next administration if he wins. Just imagine Mike Pompeo or Tom Cotton running the Pentagon, and you can see what I’m talking about. We know that he surrounded himself with warmongers last time, and his foreign policy advisers this time are all hardliners and hawks of one kind or another. Some are more obsessed with China, and some are obsessed with Iran, but all of them want the U.S. to pursue more aggressive and confrontational policies. That suits Trump just fine.

Antiwar voters are understandably drawn to candidates that say the right things about ending our unnecessary and illegal wars, but we know enough about Trump to understand that he is a foreign policy snake oil salesman. He presents himself as the cure-all remedy for what ails U.S. foreign policy, but in practice he simply exacerbates most of its worst features. Trump tries to con the American people into believing that he represents a radical break with the failed policies of the last two decades, but in reality he keeps all the worst policies in place and adds more of the same. Trump’s foreign policy is just a crueler version of the status quo, and no one should be fooled into believing otherwise.